More had Tudor views on punishment

SIR - John Guy is right to remind us that Thomas More was not a modern liberal: Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons is superb theatre, but woeful history (letter, Oct. 6).

But to talk of More's "dark side" and "double standards" is equally misleading. Like most of his contemporaries, More thought of heretics as we think of drug-pushers, people who, for selfish motives, poison the life of society.

As Lord Chancellor, he sought out and punished heresy, and believed that stubborn heretics - "the devil's stinking martyrs" - could licitly be executed. Courage in a dying heretic he saw as a sign of suicidal pride and folly, not proof of the truth of the teaching for which they died.

Such convictions repel most of us now, but were held almost universally in More's time, and the notion that error had no rights was not finally repudiated by the Roman Catholic Church until the 1960s. Any truthful assessment of his stature as a human being must certainly take account of these uncomfortable facts.

But Prof Guy knows full well that the stories to which he alludes about More torturing Protestants in his house at Chelsea are pure invention, which More circumstantially refuted in his own lifetime. More did have a teenage servant caned for upsetting his fellow servants with blasphemous remarks about the Blessed Sacrament, and he ordered the thrashing of a (probably mentally disturbed) man who made a habit of pulling up women's skirts to expose their bare backsides during Mass: once again corporal punishments of this kind offend modern sensibilities, but were regarded as routine "correction" in Tudor England.

It is simply absurd to hint that they represent a "dark side" to More's nature. I do not know whether it is a good thing to make a 16th-century man the patron saint of modern politicians: certainly no one should hold up More as an easy-going advocate of tolerance. But although every word he wrote has been published, and his career has been put under the historical microscope, More's life can bear such scrutiny. No one can seriously doubt his courage, integrity or unrelenting pursuit of truth as the basis of public life. These do not seem, on the face of it, contemptible ideals for our politicians to aspire to.